Mutant Pizza

It’s back, baby!

I don’t know your life story, what was this game again?

Color Space was a two player abstract spacial puzzle. It was okay. It was also the first game I ever really designed. I loved it. It was my baby and when God itself spoke from the heavens, telling me to dash my baby upon the rocks so I could focus on my newer, shinier baby — what became Nine Muses — at the time, I said to this mysterious voice okay then and did so. I don’t regret this decision, it was the right one to make at the time. As Kevin Smith has said, Sometimes, you have to kill your baby.

We’re still speaking about creative endeavors, mind you. I’m not about to become the human equivalent of a hungry hamster mom. I’d never do that. Human babies probably taste awful. Oh, and it’s wrong — of course.

Factoid: I still have the Tabletop Simulator up somewhere for a limited time only. (As I’ll be modifying it at some point to fit the new game).

The game had its problems, though. It was difficult for people to grok until they’ve played it a few times, which for a small box, quick abstract game, isn’t a good place to be. It wasn’t one of those I get the game but I’ll need to play it a few times to feel confident in it. It was one of those What am I supposed to do again? types of games.

It also lacked tension, as players could opt to avoid conflict to accomplish their goals.

Icing on the cake, the game consisted of some wicked custom parts that would be difficult to manufacture, especially as the lil baby indie designer that I am. So I put it in stasis until my circumstances changed.

I think I get it, so why’d you pull it off the shelf?

There’s an indie market that seems like a great way for me to push myself to get out there more. You know, in the world. The board game world. This is a game that would be difficult to mass produce, but maybe not hard for me to make fifty-or-so copies of and sell at an indie board games market, say, at PAX or other convensions.

Now, I haven’t fully committed to signing up for the indie market. I want to be confident that the game is solid enough, or I can get it solid enough and produce the needed copies, by August to be ready for a convention.

Is it still the ‘okay’ game that it was?

Hell no, amigo. It’s <twinkle> new </twinkle> and <magic wand> improved </magic wand> from top to bottom. It’s a light, asynchronous game now, my friends!

A bit of history–

No more history, I’m out of here!

Wait, it’ll be brief, I promise…

When I shelved Color Space, I began picking apart its corpse like so many creative vultures. As Kevin Smith has said, Sometimes, you have to eat your baby. Okay, he didn’t say that, but that’s just what we do. When something doesn’t work, we reuse elements of it in other projects. In the business world, people will call this cannibalizing with a straight face, as if that’s just a normal thing to say about business-y things.

In this instance, I call it Robbing Peter to pay Paul. In essence, I took thematic elements of Color Space and baked them into a two player asynchronous game that I’ve been calling Escape the Entity. (You may have read some design journals about it, or not. I don’t know you.)

After bringing Color Space back and trying a few things that didn’t work, didn’t solve the issue of lack of tension, I decided to rethink the game entirely. What if Color Space were a fast, light, asynchronous two player game. Now we’re cooking with gas, sweetheart!

I’ve spent the past week and change testing out a bombardment of ideas and I’ve landed on something that feels good to play. I’ve only had the opportunity to playtest it against myself, though, so I’m eager to get it to a table with some other folks and see what they thing.

What’s next?

I’m sorry this design journal has really been a history lesson, lacking discussion around…what’s it called…design. I needed to get all that out in the open for some reason. My next journal entry on Color Space will focus on the recent journey I’ve undertaken with the game over the past few weeks.

To make up for it, here’s an image of a playtest where I ended up forming some Brontosaurus looking creature.

Stay tuned for my next journal entry on this, pals.